China’s livestock transition: driving forces, impacts and consequences.

China’s livestock production has experienced with huge changes in the past few decades, with tremendous increase of production scale, and changes of production efficiency, structure and spatial distribution. These changes have large impacts on the nutrient flows, greenhouse gas (GHG) emission and fate of manure, as different production systems and livestock categories are varied in nutrient use efficiency at different level and GHG emission. The cause-effects of past changes in livestock production for different livestock categories, and the perspectives of future livestock production in China are not clear. There is need for insight into the impacts of consequences of this livestock transition, as China’s future livestock food demand are projected to be doubled between 2010 and 2050. This research addresses the following questions: i) How the livestock production was transited from 1980 to 2010? What are the impacts of this transition on the nutrients flows throughout the soil-crop-livestock production chain? ii) How the livestock transition impacts on the productivity and feed use of livestock production, and hence impacts on land use? How was the total and average GHG emission from soil-crop-livestock production chain have been changed in the livestock transition? iii) How the livestock production has been unevenly distributed at the regional level in China? What are the environmental effects of the uneven spatial distribution of livestock production? Iv) How will China’s livestock change under different Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) based on the past transition? How to spatial planning of crop and livestock production in China at the county level?